AmEx is really pushing their Delta Cards of which I already have all three. Every year I get 2 companion passes, one from my Platinum and another from my Reserve AmEx card. Since I get the annual fee waived for being active duty, it’s like a 2 free delta roundtrip tickets from AmEx every year! This means I can bring along a companion on a flight for free, even in first class (with the reserve) for any domestic ticket I buy!

Please use this link for the Reserve to get 40k SkyMiles and 10k MQM. The $450 annual fee is waived for military. The Platinum offer is below and they dropped the minimum spend to $3k from $4k for the same points and credit, again the $195 annual fee is waived for military:

Now lets say we go for all three here, we can get another 60k on gold for $3k spend:

Please use this link here for the gold. If you go for all three, we are looking at a total of 170K SkyMiles, 20k MQM, $150 statement credit, and 2 companion passes all for $9,000 spend. Now bonus strategy time is to product change the Platinum and Gold to Reserve for three first class companion passes a year!

The 20k MQM will put you up to almost Silver Medallion (25k needed) for the year without ever setting foot on a plane. The 170k will get you three round trips from ORD to SEA (44,500 SkyMiles) to go visit your favorite O-4 reader that just PCSed:

If Seattle isn’t your thing, you can fly 10 segments to and from Atlanta for 17k SkyMiles per segment.

So if you got $3,000 to spend three times, might as well make it worth it for some free travel from Delta and AmEx!

Well lets just say we end up upgrading the Delta Gold and Platinum both to Reserve, With three reserve cards we are looking at 3 round trip flights a year in first class for the price of coach! Every year you will have a deposit of a companion pass held electronically in your SkyMiles account:

You then apply it to book a pair of tickets, it must be used in a year of it being issued. Here is ORD to SEA round trip:

For $845.80 or $211.45 a segment you can fly first class to SEA from ORD as your companion gets to fly for free! This is the cost of a regular coach ticket. Take advantage of the annual fee waiver for the Reserve, and when your AD time is up, downgrade all the cards to Gold to take advantage of the account history without annual fee.